Rudolf Schriever

Rudolf Schriever (1909–1953) was a German pilot who after the war drove for the United States Army at Bremerhaven. In an interview in Der Spiegel of 30 March 1950 he said he had conceived a disc-shaped aircraft in 1942, a ring of rotating turbine blades around a fixed crew cabin that he called the Flugkreisel (flying top), that engineers in Prague had drawn up the plans in 1943, and that the plans and a model were stolen from him in 1948. Gerhard Wiechmann identifies the Spiegel article as probably the most frequently cited source of the flying-disc legend. Michael Salla's Exopolitics Briefing Document cites Schriever, with Giuseppe Belluzzo, as one of the two engineers who first publicly revealed in 1950 that Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany collaborated in the reverse engineering of flying saucer technologies.

Henry Stevens and Salla treat Schriever as a participant who went on the public record about German disc programmes, and Joseph Andreas Epp says the Schriever–Habermohl discs followed his own design; Salla attributes the thin paper trail to intelligence agencies keeping a tight hold on the documents, and Anton notes that records of German weapons work were either destroyed or in Allied hands. Wiechmann reads the craft the Spiegel article describes as a product of fantasy at odds with physics, and reports that his inquiries to archives and museums, the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv among them, came back negative. Nick Cook, tracing the legend, found it rested on Schriever's word alone and that BMW's archivists deny a BMW works near Prague engaged in advanced aircraft projects, and reports that some researchers, noting that Belluzzo had spoken a few days earlier, concluded Schriever had invented his story. The book excerpt reproduced on Find a Grave doubts that Schriever could have designed such a craft alone and suggests he was a test pilot.

Career

Wehrmacht records-office data quoted from Klaus-Peter Rothkugel's book on a Find a Grave memorial place Schriever, born in Bremen, as an Einflieger (flight tester of repaired aircraft) at the Eger (Cheb) aircraft works from 27 June 1941 to July 1943 and at the Böhmisch-Mährische Maschinenfabrik in Prague from 1 July 1943; after the war he drove for the US Army motor pool in Bremerhaven.

Cook, tracing the legend, places Schriever at Heinkel's Marienehe works near Rostock, where Ernst Heinkel encouraged him in early 1940 to build a small flying prototype, and Pilkington's summary of the interview calls him a former Luftwaffe captain and Prague University graduate.

The 1950 interview

Der Spiegel ran the interview on 30 March 1950 as part of an article about flying saucers over Europe, six days after Belluzzo's statement reached the Associated Press; Pilkington records that Schriever said he had worked on the project from 1942, and describes a forty-nine-foot craft with a central crew cabin, a rim rotating at great speed and jet turbines beneath it, capable of speeds up to 1,200 miles per hour. Wiechmann, in Andreas Anton's summary, reports Schriever's claim of a horizontal speed of 4,200 kilometres per hour and a range of 6,000 kilometres, and Anton says the magazine took the story up after Belluzzo's, offering it without critical comment. Cook reports Belluzzo spoke to the media just a few days before Schriever.

Stevens, summarising the interview, has Schriever working on the project until 15 April 1945, packing the plans into the trunk of his BMW and driving with his family into southern Germany, setting up an inventor's workshop at his parents' house in Bremerhaven-Lehe, where a break-in on 4 August 1948 took the plans and the model, and declining approaches from agents of "foreign powers" in favour of a job driving a truck for the US Army. Anton gives the theft as from the garden house of Schriever's parents-in-law. Pilkington adds that as other publications picked up the story Schriever said a flying prototype had been destroyed or had fallen into Russian hands, and that he was convinced the Russians or the Americans were flying craft based on his designs.

Pilkington has Schriever saying a working model had flown in 1945, Stevens writes that Schriever never claimed his saucer flew at all, and Wiechmann says he had speculated in 1950 that a flying-top model he had built might have fallen into Czech hands but never claimed to have built a prototype, let alone flown one.

The legend after 1950

The Bremerhaven register of deaths gives Schriever's death on 16 January 1953, from a heart attack, according to the Find a Grave memorial; Pilkington writes that he reportedly died in a car accident a year after going public. Wiechmann notes that the newspaper series of Georg Klein appeared practically immediately after Schriever's early death, and in a Welt am Sonntag interview of April 1953 Klein said he had witnessed the first manned flight of the Schriever–Habermohl disc at Prague on 14 February 1945, which he said reached 12,400 metres in three minutes and 2,200 kilometres per hour; Anton reports that Klein's role as Speer's special commissioner cannot be verified. Rudolf Lusar's 1956 book named "the German experts Schriever, Habermohl and Miethe, and the Italian Bellonzo," and Wiechmann finds that Lusar followed the press articles of the early 1950s and that by the late 1950s German official publications repeated the story as fact, so that a fiction of the press had become official fact.

Cook found that the detailed legend of the Prague disc was based heavily on Schriever's say-so, that attempts to trace Habermohl and Miethe had foundered, and that BMW's archivists denied any BMW factory near Prague engaged in advanced aircraft work. Pilkington writes that there is little evidence for the claims beyond the initial flurry of press reports, though he notes that the aviation magazine Flugzeug ran a pilot's recollection in 1987 of a test flight in August or September 1943 at Praha-Kbely airfield of a twenty-foot disc with a central cabin and rotating outer rim. Epp says he originated the design used in the Schriever–Habermohl project and that the early imbalance of its ring of wing-vanes was a departure from it; Anton reports that there is no evidence for Epp's claims.

Open questions

References

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